Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney in NATIONAL VELVET Available on Blu-ray November 16th From Warner Archive

“What’s the meaning of goodness if there isn’t a little badness to overcome?”

Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney in NATIONAL VELVET (1944) will be available on Blu-ray November 16th from Warner Archive

As long as young hearts endure, so will National Velvet and movies like it. in her star-making role, Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a wide-eyed adolescent who, assisted by her jockey pal (Mickey Rooney), trains Pie, a horse she won in a raffle, for the Grand National Steeplechase. Of course, no girl can ride in the National, can she? Yet Velvet, posing as a boy, assuredly does. Superbly directed by Clarence Brown, this exciting winner of two Academy Awards®* (one to Anne Revere for her performance as Velvet’s mother) costars a young Angela Lansbury and veteran Donald Crisp. The film has an off-screen postscript as winning as the on-screen finale:

M-G-M was so impressed with their young new star’s work on the film, that the studio gave Pie to Miss Taylor after filming completed.